Movies I Have Seen Lately

Saw a Takashi Miike picture called The Great Yokai War. "Yokai" is a Japanese term for monsters from folklore, as opposed to the more familiar kaiju. It's a kids' picture, about a young boy from Tokyo sent out to live in the countryside with his older sister and his intermittently senile grandfather. When a vengeful spirit appears, the boy gets caught up in a war between warring groups of yokai and must find his courage to become the "Kirin Rider", the hero who will set everything to rights. It's not a bad picture - nothing deep, but an amusing story. Some of the yokai are really trippy, Japanese folklore can get pretty "out there", apparently.

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I'm sure this is a tired subject here by now; but, I finally saw Wonder Woman; and, I had to comment. Given the hype for this DC movie, I expected to be disappointed. In fact, in some ways I found this movie to be as needlessly dark as both Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman. What saved it was Gal Gadot's brilliant performance as a genuinely compassionate, naive, but strong and confident heroine. Where Man of Steel failed to inspire, the darker WWI setting in Wonder Wonan allowed room for Gadot to exhibit a sense of hope and optimism that was not felt un DC's previous films. Trevor's sacrifice had, unquestioningly, been done before; but, it seemed like an itegeral part of Wonder Woman's charactor development (albeit, very late in the film).

So, did it live up to the hype? The acting certainly did. On the whole, there's nothing critical I can say, except that it felt like a DC film. By far, without question, the best DC film, but none the less, a DC film.

Speaking of Wonder Woman, I procrastinated too long to see William Marston and the Wonder Women in the theater, but I happened to see it at Barnes and Noble over the weekend for $25. We were making several other purchases that day so I didn’t buy it, but I did check the price on Amazon that evening: $15. Amazon also had a CD I wanted for $5 less than B&N. No one was staffed in the record department that day (common these days), and only one cashier on duty with a line of customers 10 deep. With this business model, I think B&N will soon go the way of Borders. But I digress…

ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY (1945): This Bela Lugosi movie was part of the Karloff/Lugosi set I’ve been watching. It’s a comedy starring two “Abbott & Costello” wannabes. The end of the movie Ed Wood points out that Bela Lugosi paraphernalia outsells that of Boris Karloff, but I dispute that. I would concede that Dracula is more popular than Frankenstein’s monster, but Karloff is by far the better actor.

William Marston and the Wonder Women is worth seeing, though be aware it speculates quite a bit. Whether it's worth $25.00 is another matter.

Jeff of Earth-J said:

Speaking of Wonder Woman, I procrastinated too long to see William Marston and the Wonder Women in the theater, but I happened to see it at Barnes and Noble over the weekend for $25. We were making several other purchases that day so I didn’t buy it, but I did check the price on Amazon that evening: $15. Amazon also had a CD I wanted for $5 less than B&N. No one was staffed in the record department that day (common these days), and only one cashier on duty with a line of customers 10 deep. With this business model, I think B&N will soon go the way of Borders. But I digress…

ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY (1945): This Bela Lugosi movie was part of the Karloff/Lugosi set I’ve been watching. It’s a comedy starring two “Abbott & Costello” wannabes. The end of the movie Ed Wood points out that Bela Lugosi paraphernalia outsells that of Boris Karloff, but I dispute that. I would concede that Dracula is more popular than Frankenstein’s monster, but Karloff is by far the better actor.

WILLIAM MARSTON and the WONDER WOMEN: As I suspected, this movie would make a good double feature with Wonder Woman. (It would also make a good double feature with Whole Wide World, I think.) I imagine it’s highly fictionalized, as all movies of this kind must be, but it connected a few dots for me in terms of how such a relationship could exist and came to be in the first place. I found one instance of how the movie played a little loose with the facts: at the very end when the super-imposed text filled in what happened later, it said that, after Marston died (of cancer in 1947), the bondage aspect disappeared… and Wonder Woman lost all her powers. Sure she did… 21 years later. I must say, it really put me in the mood to read my Wonder Woman Archives.

We watched Marston a couple of days ago. The acting was top-notch. Since most of their story was private it would have to be enhanced with imagined scenes. The scenes, however, rang true. That the women were together for almost 40 years after his death made it poignant and the photographs at the end made it clear there were four children, not two (we checked). The picture of the two elderly ladies arm-in-arm was very touching. There was a little license taken in implying that the coughing Marston died of lung cancer when in fact he died of skin cancer.

Last night we watched War For The Planet Of The Apes. Both my wife and I thought it was the best entry of the current series. The CGI work on the series has improved quite a bit since the Rise of POTA and Andy Serkis does a superb job in helping make Caesar a sympathetic character. Much as I love the original 1968 film, using a disease as the catalyst for Earth's transformation into an ape dominated planet works much better than the nuclear war that was implied in the original.